


Take The Keys (And Drive Forever)

by SophiaCatherine



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Casual sex (still Lisa), F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied Past Rape/Non-Con, Referenced canonical character death, Road Trips, Violence (this is Lisa Snart after all), creepy horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 21:03:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19181344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/pseuds/SophiaCatherine
Summary: She runs.Some days, she doesn’t know why she doesn’t just turn around and ride right back home. Other days, the idea makes her shiver. The thought of what’s waiting for her in Central.Of who’s not.She gets into bar fights and street fights, just to feel bones crack under her hands. The wrench of a shoulder from a socket; the crunch of a nose against her fist. Chasing that glorious look of fear in their eyes.There's something chasing Lisa...





	Take The Keys (And Drive Forever)

**Author's Note:**

> _Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake._ \- Nick Cave
> 
> All titles from Aimee Mann's [Humpty Dumpty](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjDr8lfLZZE).
> 
> Somewhat inspired by the podcast ‘Alice Isn’t Dead’, but not a crossover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Thette for excellent beta reading, as always.

Her brother is in every brick and paving stone of Central City.

He’s etched into the streets he walked her along when he took her to school, his big hand in her little one, holding on tight through those safest twenty minutes of her day.

_(One, two, three, four—I can see you counting steps, Lenny—don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your back—)_

She starts leaving her apartment in the other direction. It’s faster, anyway.

He’s in every safe house she still uses. Ghosts of his blueprints on the table, echoes of his voice in the empty rooms.

She rents a new warehouse for the Rogues. They needed better spaces to work out of, anyway.

He’s in the line at the bank, of _course._ At least that memory sets her off giggling like a child, while she’s standing in line, just making a deposit like an honest citizen.

She finds another bank branch. There’s a closer one, anyway.

Even at Jitters, for fuck’s sake, catching her unawares just getting coffee at the counter, when she turns around and her gaze falls on the table where she’d asked Cisco—

_(I need your help. My brother’s been kidnapped.)_

She leaves, sweeping out like a storm, before her latte is ready. She didn’t want coffee anyway.

* * *

 

Lisa leaves Central City a month after Mick gives her the news. Gets on her bike and just... rides away.

* * *

 

Lenny bought her her first bike when she was 17.

Before that, she kept stealing his. And then _maybe_ she’d stolen someone else’s. Just, you know, temporarily.

Her brother hit the roof, which was both ridiculous and made him a huge hypocrite. Expressing either of these opinions to Lenny was useless. But really, she never saw what all the fuss was about. Not back then. So she lifted a few pretty things off store shelves, graduated to breaking the occasional store window, but who was counting the charges on her record anyway?

Lenny was, apparently. And he got _mad._ Like, scary mad. The guy had never raised so much as his _voice_ at her—there were lines he didn’t cross—but he could be as intimidating as Lewis Snart with a single look. More, because she actually gave a damn what he thought.

Mostly. On this one, she didn’t give a shit. But it didn't matter how wrong he was, he wasn’t listening. “You don’t _ever_ end up in a situation where your only choice is to make a living from crime,” he said, stone-faced. “You can do better than that.”

And she’d turned on the pout and sad eyes, the ones that always got her what she wanted. “But, Lenny—”

“You heard me,” he said, walking away before she could argue back. And even though he was wrong wrong _wrong_ and a two-faced bastard, she wasn’t about to push, when he was in that mood.

So the next day, when a new motorcycle appeared out front of their apartment block, its chrome sheen sparkling against the crumbling wall it was leaning against, she nearly hugged him.

“Don’t make a big deal of it, sis,” he drawled. He was slouching against the wall by the bike, casual and indifferent—but the smile on his face was fond.

She didn’t hug him. But he spent weeks teaching her how to ride that thing.

The motorcycle she’s riding now is not that bike. That one is years gone, probably still rusting away out where they dumped it by the river when it finally gave up the ghost.

She never gave it a second thought.

* * *

 

She runs.

Some days, she doesn’t know why she doesn’t just turn around and ride right back home. Other days, the idea makes her shiver. The thought of what’s waiting for her in Central.

Of who’s not.

She gets into bar fights and street fights, just to feel bones crack under her hands. The wrench of a shoulder from a socket; the crunch of a nose against her fist. Chasing that glorious look of fear in their eyes.

The man who slides onto the stool next to her stinks of Jack Daniels. It turns her stomach before he says a single word. She covers her grimace, downing the shot of vodka in front of her, and he laughs.

“Damn. You can hold your liquor, sweetheart.”

You can’t, she thinks. But she smiles at him with the same charm she turns on every mark when she’s grifting. Just to see where this goes.

His hand low on her back makes every muscle in her body tense up, but he doesn’t notice. He just keeps sliding it lower, until his creeping fingers are skimming under her belt.

Every muscle in her body wants to freeze. She forces herself to pull away, fast, the way she’s been running from men for years. Looks up to see the bastard bracing his drunk ass against the bar, a too-big hand splayed out across it. Slow as death, she slides her own hand across the bar, briefly letting her fingertips meet his.

His wolfish smile drops open into a scream as his hand turns to gold. He pulls at it frantically where it’s gilded to the bar, eyes wide, panting at her.

Yeah, he should be afraid.

Too many encounters like that, running the gamut from the meaningless to the unspeakable. In between, the moments that make it worth it. The quiet of the open road, with its limitless possibilities and space to breathe. The incredible views—landscapes or pretty boys and girls. The jobs, where she can get them. Though she mostly defaults to lifting wallets, like she’s a damn teenager again.

She doesn’t have it in her to pull anything bigger. It would mean joining—someone else’s crew.

So she runs.

She just hopes she doesn’t drive off the end of the world before she shakes off whatever’s chasing her.

Because there’s something after her.

* * *

 

Colorado is too close to home.

She’s been everywhere, on this trip—if she can even call it a trip anymore, when she’s pretty much living on the road by now. She’s not just aimlessly wandering—she’s _not—_ but she keeps finding herself back within spitting distance of home. She’s spent too long slinking between the straight lines of Middle America. The flat, insipid landscapes where you can see, and be seen, for miles.

Where there’s nowhere to hide.

But the miles of flat land gradually, _finally_ open up, plunging down into valleys, diving up towards breathtaking mountains, and her lungs open up with the skyline.

She drives as high as she can, till she hits a closed road, a sign warning of falling rocks. Gets out and walks to a viewing platform jutting off the sheer edge of a mountain.

Up here, she gets what they mean when they talk about that weird urge people get, to throw themselves off of high places. The call of the abyss. She read once that it really means you want to live, not die. She gazes out at the valley rolling out beneath her, at the slice of the hillsides and the dark, seductive river, at the vicious jagged edge of the cliff that drops straight down for thousands of feet below. And she’s not sure they’re right about that.

The familiar small towns always call her back eventually. To all the shit she’s always known—the empty lots, the decaying buildings, the hopeless stench of rot and poverty.

To living, not dying.

If that’s really what you can call this.

* * *

 

There’s something after her.

The feeling is constant now, stalking her wherever she goes. The dead certainty that someone—something—is following her.

And it’s not some guy with greedy hands, some girl who wants to use her and leave her. It’s not cops or Families. It’s nothing she’s ever run from before. It’s something even darker, something she can’t chase off with a practiced fist or a perfect shot from her gun.

For weeks she told herself she was just going crazy. But she knows she’s not.

The shadow slithering in the alleyway.

The face reflected in the empty motel room window, gone when she turns around. Long and sharp and... not quite human.

* * *

  
Lisa can, and does, judge a person by their reaction when they find out she drives a semi. She’s had her Class A CDL license since she was 22.

It took a while for the other regulars on the trucker routes to figure her out, but they’re used to her now. It helps that she has a rep for fucking up the guys who think she’s a little girl who doesn’t know where the key goes in her 18-wheeler. (Up their asses, is usually the answer.)

“Oh yeah, that’s Lisa,” they whisper at the trucker stops, while she saunters by in today’s outfit, all black leather and platform shoes. “Looks amazing, right? Yeah, you don’t wanna hit that, bud. Mack saw her kill a guy with one heel for getting in her way.”

She grins. Doesn’t bother correcting them. If she did, she’d point out for the record that she didn’t kill anyone—just made him wish she had. Also for the record, the fucker deserved it. No one voices an opinion that Lisa’s not up to her job and gets away with it.

“You’re not getting into this business,” Lenny had insisted, every time she’d asked if she could join his crew. For years. “Now stop asking.”

And, well. Not for nothing was she the daughter of one crook and the sister of another. Growing up, she might have been quiet—terrorized into silence—but she was always paying attention. She knew crews needed drivers, knew Lenny hired guys with professional experience. He could rely on them to keep a skilled head on their shoulders when shit went down and they were behind the wheel.

When she turned 21, she lifted enough wallets that she could afford it, and then she registered for a trucker school. Within a year she was driving 18-wheelers across the country.

“I’d have thought you’d be happy,” she said sweetly to her suspicious brother. “I just wanted a good job that keeps me out of the criminal life. Like you’re always telling me I need.”

He didn’t swallow a word of it, but there was nothing he could do.

By the time she came to him for a job, Lenny was perfectly well aware that she’d been driving for his rivals for years. She dropped the appointment card from the Darbinyans on the table and walked away without a word.

She was driving for Lenny’s crew a week later. Convenient, really—because it wasn’t long before a raid on the Families saw a bunch of their crews in jail. Including all the Darbinyans’ drivers.

“Wasn’t that lucky?” was all she said to a seething Lenny.

She hasn’t gotten behind the wheel of a truck again since Mick came to see her, but she doesn’t stop riding the bike.

She never bought into any of that _he’s still with me_ crap. Lenny was blown to tiny little fucking pieces and he’s never coming back.

But she’s still riding the bike.

* * *

 

She’s taking her time winding through a sleepy mountain pass, the only light a half-moon high in the sky and her headlights. She feels, more than sees, the deep drop just to her left, the sheer rock face rising to her right.

It’s like walking a tightrope, or... skating an outside edge. She smiles into the wind, remembering the silence as a watching crowd holds its breath and she cuts a deep curve into the ice. A jump into a waiting partner’s arms. Pulling down into a death spiral that all but lives up to its name.

It’s a different kind of silence, out here on the dark mountain road. Even over the hum of her engine, the irregular crackle of the CB radio.

A moment later, she blinks into the reflected glare from her mirror. She’s picked up a tailgater. A car, probably black—hard to make out any details against glaring lights.

The car overtakes her, roaring into the silence, wrapping tightly around to her right.

And closer.

Till it’s almost flush against her, jerking in and out.

The black drop into the valley looms on her left. She swerves. Her headlights show up falling stones plummeting down into the darkness.

The car doesn’t give her an inch.

She’d almost forgotten that feeling, the slow-building, heart-pounding panic of the certainty that your chances of getting out of this alive are dropping fast. It’s been a while.

 _When it comes down to it, survival is all that matters,_ Lenny said to her once. _It ain’t always pretty or noble, but it means you on top when you could have been crushed under someone else’s boot._

She’s never cared about looking noble.

She revs, swerving right, her wing mirror screeching against the side of the car. As she leaves the bastard in her wake, she grins into the oncoming darkness. Must have made a lovely mess of that door.

She’s ten miles down the road, still pulling breakneck speeds, before she realises her mirror’s hanging off at a dangerous angle. Pulls over to check for other damage.

And sees it.

A face in the mirror. Long and sharp and... very far from human. Blinking into focus—and gone again.

Her head whips around and there’s nothing.

She abandons her bike, clambering down the slope on the other side of the road, sliding onto the steep ground. Shaking hands on her head.

The road is quiet, above and behind her. Nothing drives past. There’s just the darkness spread out below, and the empty, menacing silence.

Nothing.

Nothing.

* * *

 

In the bright sunlight of the next morning she wonders if she imagined it.

A crackle from her CB radio. “Radio check for Tom Cat,” says a man’s voice, with an accent from somewhere around Texas.

Not many truckers use CB radio anymore, now that it’s all GPS. She gets it—the creepy robots always know where the pigs are. But it makes trucking an even more lonely job than it used to be. All those drivers locked in their metal boxes, silent strangers passing each other on the highway. But Lisa is old school. For weeks after she set off on this trip, her handheld radio mounted on the handles of her bike was her only human connection. The only voices she heard, or spoke to.

“You’re coming through loud and clear, Tom Cat,” she says into the radio, when no one else answers.

“10-4. Thanks,” the guy replies.

“This is Goldilocks on the 72 heading south,” she adds. Nothing wrong with taking advantage of a friendly voice for information, after all. “Just past the 92 junction.”

“Bear trap coming up ahead of you. Pigs ain’t advertising, so keep your eyes peeled.”

“Thanks.” Always useful to know about a speed trap. The last thing Lisa needs is to get pulled over only a state away from home, still recognizable as Golden Glider as she is. “Hey, you haven’t seen a car trying to run bikes off the road, have you? Got damn near flattened last night.”

He grunts a noise of sympathy. “Heard of kids trying to freak people out that way, out in the hills, sometimes. You can mostly tell they don’t mean it. This one serious?”

“Looked that way.”

“Get his plates?”

Oh sure, she never thought of that. “It was dark, his lights were turned way up, and he was trying to run me off a damn mountain. What do you think?”

A hiss of laughter over the airways. “I’ll put the word out for bikers to watch their backs, Goldie. You take care out there.”

The patronising tone _almost_ doesn’t rankle. A sign it’s been too long since she spoke to anyone.

_Anyone…_

The flash of a face in the mirror yesterday, blank and anonymous.  

She turns off the radio.

* * *

 

There are pretty girls and boys in every bar in every town in America. Some pretty enough that Lisa thinks about it. Just a few worth taking up the offers. (They're tireless. She's... tired.)

Not many, though.

It’s too easy, like picking up a mark. She doesn’t even need a wig to become someone else. Just slides into an old, rehearsed persona like a second skin. Picking it off the menu. Angela, blond engineer with a discerning eye. Ginny, giggly cashier who likes her drink. Esther, standoffish but with a heart of gold.

But she doesn’t do that anymore.

There’s a _very_ pretty girl at the dive bar in Boulder. Weird looking, but gorgeous. White eyes and hair. Voice echoing like something out of Dragon Ball Z, when she orders a gin and tonic like she owns the place. Crowded against the bar by guys trying to grab her ass, at first, but just makes a face and lays a hand on a couple of shoulders, and they shiver and leave. Lisa thinks about asking her what a nice meta is doing in a place this far from Central, but the thought is only funny for a second.

The woman’s familiar, somehow, even though Lisa can’t place her. A metahuman like that… Lisa would have remembered her. Would have tried to recruit her to the Rogues, probably.

Her dead heart absolutely doesn’t squeeze vice-tight at that thought, as she swirls the cloudy liquid around in her glass. Her brother and his shit plans that he never saw through. Because he had better places to be.

Not to be.

The back streets are empty when she leaves the bar, climbs, yawning, onto her bike… and freezes.

She’s no stranger to that prickling of all the hairs at the back of her neck, up both her arms. Her early warning system, taught to her by someone who had long perfected his own. Later, just knowing _he_ was home was all it took to set it off. Years afterwards, she only needed the barest of hints to know when trouble was on the way—a parole board hearing notice here, a rumour of a raid there, the word on the street that an ex she didn’t want to see was back in town.

So whatever it is that has set her alarms off now—a low-moving shadow, the glint of a knife, or a distant blue flashing light—she knows it means nothing good.

The shadow fades, and there’s nothing there. Nothing that she can see.

“I’m losing my fucking mind,” she gripes, under her breath, like a prayer for the lost.

She’s a little way down the road, sitting on a wall in the hotel parking lot, eating McDonald’s out of a bag, when she hears it.

Breathing. Slow; predatory; close.

She knows, with the kind of certainty that has her on her feet and fleeing for her room like she’s eight years old again, that the danger is not just in her head.

She drops to the floor, her back to the motel room door she’s slammed behind her. Sits there, breathing hard, long after the danger never reaches her.

* * *

 

And then, nothing. For enough days that she begins to doubt herself again.

Not really her fault if her brain’s getting a little weird, a little fucked up, recently. It’s just all this time alone.

That’s all.

She fights back. Gets into a few more fights. Holds up a gas station, for old times’ sake. There’s an old guy behind the register whose hands shake like her grandfather’s. She leaves the money on the counter.

Takes a gorgeous boy to bed, all long legs and far too young for her, but damn he’s fine. Reminds her a little of Cisco. She ignores the weird twinge she gets at that thought, wrapping her legs tighter around the pretty young thing underneath her. Gets him to squeal. Watches him writhing. She’s going to make that gorgeous trembling lip twitch faster, make him beg for it, make him cry. Wreck him for anyone else. _Ever._

 _Or you could just kill him,_ says a voice at a dark, quiet edge of her mind.

He bucks underneath her, too demanding. “Come on, Laura.” Not nearly close enough to begging.

She feels her nostrils flare in the dark. “That’s not my name.”

He laughs and ruts up against her again. God, he doesn’t even know where to put it. She dresses up in her most dangerous smile—always give them a show, even the worthless clowns who don’t fucking deserve one—and wraps a hand around his dick, examining the nails on her other hand in the meantime.

He makes all kinds of inhuman noises.

“That’s great, sweetheart,” is all she says, not long after he comes with a shout that should not have been nearly that enthusiastic, under the circumstances. “Now get out.”

She doesn’t even bother turning the light back on, after. Just lies there alone in the dark, staring at raised, hollow patterns criss-crossing the ceiling, illuminated by rising and falling headlights from the street outside. Identical to the last motel room ceiling. And the one before that, and the one before that.

* * *

 

The next day, she startles awake at the first light filtering in between dusty curtains, her breath coming tight and fast after a nightmare she doesn’t remember, and she’s done with Colorado.

She unfolds a map across the chipped formica table, her eye falling on the wide green spot labelled _Grand Canyon._ Well, she’s never been there. Time to blow this shithole.

It’s not like she was getting used to the place.

It’s not like she’s sad.

The sun is up, now, but the alley behind the all-night cafe is empty as she walks back to her bike, breakfast burrito in hand, bag slung over her shoulder.

The gun pressed to her back registers a split-second too late. Her hands are already pinned behind her back.

“Don’t fuss and I’ll make it quick, sweetheart,” he grates in her ear.

_Don’t cry, baby. I’ll make it good for you._

Oh, thinks a terrifyingly detached part of her brain. There’s the rage. There’s the sure-fire knowledge that this man is going to die.

That she’s going to kill him.

She flinches at the movement at her hip when he grabs her gold gun, kicks it down the alley.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” says a lilting voice with a strange echo to it. Familiar, but not.

It's the white-haired meta. And Lisa can’t believe she didn’t recognize her before. _“Snow,”_ she says through her teeth.

The smirk that crosses that face, proud where it should be meek, is stranger than the white hair framing it, more out-of-place than those (admittedly hot) leather pants. That tight, off-the-shoulder top, flaunting pale, unblemished skin, a sultry curve of cleavage. Even with a gun at her back, Lisa lets her eyes drift over that picture.

Snow’s face is twisted in very familiar rage. She lets out a blast of something cold from her right hand. Behind Lisa, the guy screams and goes down.

And if Lisa was mad before, she’s totally primed to murder someone now, and it might as well be this bitch. She spins around, grabbing her gold gun and aiming it right at her. “What the fuck, Snow?”

“You’re welcome,” she says in that mocking, otherworldly lilt, but it’s fading. Along with her hair, rippling back into the mousy brown Lisa’s more used to seeing on the STAR Labs doc.

Lisa blinks. Folds her arms. Feels the edge of a smile pulling at her lips. “Not bad,” she murmurs.

But every trace of that sleek, cool confidence has vanished from Snow’s face along with the white hair. She looks _horrified._ Lisa swallows reflexively. “Snow. You okay?”

Snow takes a step back, shaking her head hard. “N-no. I—”

A shadow slithers across their path.

There’s no one there.

“Run,” Lisa says, and grabs Snow’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm expecting this to have about 3 chapters (but who knows with me). There's a possibility of endgame Amunet/Caitlin/Lisa but that might have to wait for a sequel - depends where they all want to end up…

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You can find me on tumblr - SophiaInSpace.


End file.
